of the health which supports, and the youth which colours all excess or excitation, I drained, with an unsparing lip, whatever that enchanting metropolis could afford.

I have hitherto said but little of the Duchesse de Perpignan; I think it necessary now to give some account of that personage. Ever since the evening I had met her at the ambassador's, I had paid her the most unceasing attentions. I soon discovered that she had a curious sort of liaison with one of

the attachés a short, ill-made gentleman, with high shoulders, and a pale face, who wore a blue coat and buff waistcoat, wrote bad verses, and thought himself handsome. All Paris said she was excessively enamoured of this youth. As for me, I had not known her four days before I discovered that she could not be excessively enamoured of any thing but an oyster pâté and Lord Byron's Corsair. Her mind was the most marvellous mélange of sentiment and its opposite. In her amours she was Lucretia herself; in her epicurism, Apicius would

have yielded to her. She was pleased with sighs, but she adored suppers. She would leave every thing for her lover, except her dinner. The attaché soon quarrelled with her, and I was installed into the platonic honours of his office.

At first, I own that I was flattered by her choice, and though she was terribly exigeante of my petits soins, I managed to keep up her affection, and, what is still more wonderful, my own, for the better part of a month. What then cooled me was the following occurrence;

I was in her boudoir one evening, when her femme de chambre came to tell us that the duc was in the passage. Notwithstanding the innocence of our attachment, the duchesse was in a violent fright; a small door was at the left of the ottoman, on which we were sitting, "Oh, no, no, not there," cried the lady; but I, who saw no other refuge, entered it forthwith, and before she could ferret me out, the duc was in the room.

In the meanwhile, I amused myself by examining

the wonders of the new world, into which I had so abruptly immerged: on a small table before me, was deposited a remarkably constructed-night cap; I examined it as a curiosity: on each side was placed une petite cotelette de veau cru, sewed on with green-coloured silk (I remember even the smallest minutiæ), a beautiful golden wig (the duchesse never liked me to play with her hair) was on a block close by, and on another table was a set of teeth, d'une blancheur éblouissante. In this manufactory of a beauty I remained for a quarter of an hour; at the end of that time, the abigail (the duchesse had the grace to disappear) released me, and I flew down stairs like a spirit from purgatory.

From that moment the duchesse honoured me with her most deadly abhorrence. Equally silly and wicked, her schemes of revenge were as ludicrous in their execution as remorseless in their design: at one time I narrowly escaped poison in a cup of coffee-at another, she endeavoured to stab me to the heart with a paper cutter.

Notwithstanding my preservation from these attacks, this new Messalina had resolved on my destruction, and another means of attempting it still remained, which the reader will yet have the pleasure of learning.

Mr. Thornton had called upon me twice, and twice I had returned the visit, but neither of us had been at home to benefit by these reciprocities of politesse. His acquaintance with my mysterious hero of the gambling house and the Jardin des Plantes, and the keen interest I took, in spite of myself, in that unaccountable person, whom I was persuaded I had seen before in some very different scene, and under very different circumstances, made me desirous to increase a connoissance, which, from Vincent's detail, I should otherwise have been anxious to avoid. I therefore resolved to make another attempt to find him at home; and my headache being somewhat better, I took my way to his apartments in the Faubourg St. Germain.

I love that quartier-if ever I went to Paris again I should reside there. It is quite a different

world from the streets usually known to, and tenanted by the English-there, indeed, you are among the French, the fossilized remains of the old régime-the very houses have an air of desolate, yet venerable grandeur-you never pass by the white and modern mansion of a nouveau riche; all, even to the ruggedness of the pavé, breathes a haughty disdain of innovation-you cross one of the numerous bridges, and you enter into another time you are inhaling the atmosphere of a past century; no flaunting boutique, French in its trumpery, English in its prices, stares you in the face; no stiff coats, and unnatural gaits are seen anglicising up the melancholy streets. Vast hotels, with their gloomy frontals, and magnificent contempt of comfort; shops, such as shops might have been in the aristocratic days of Louis Quatorze, ere British vulgarities made them insolent and dear ;public edifices, still redolent of the superb charities of le grand monarque-carriages, with their huge bodies and ample decorations; horses, with their Norman dimensions and undocked honours; men, k

VOL. I.